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Maggie Gates:

On November 8th of this year, 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, held a landmark hearing on the human rights violations caused by the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the move to ban abortion in the US. The IACHR is a principle and autonomous body of the Organization of American States that monitors human rights across the Americas. The hearing was requested by the Center for Reproductive Rights and 13 other US organizations focused on reproductive health rights and justice, disability rights, and human rights. My guests today, Karla Torres and Catalina Martinez Coral from the Center for Reproductive Rights, were key organizers of the hearing.

Karla Torres has been Senior Human Rights Counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights since 2017, and is responsible for developing and leading the Center's work on assisted reproduction, including IVF surrogacy and embryo personhood. She works within the US Human Rights Team and collaborates with staff across various departments, including the US Policy and Advocacy and the US litigation teams, as well as the Center's Global Legal Program. Karla most recently served as a Program Officer at Equality Now, where she worked in close partnership with grassroots organizations in the Americas to expose human rights violations against women and girls, and to promote legal frameworks to protect against them. Previously, Karla was the Center's Human Rights Fellow from 2013 to 2015, during which time she was instrumental in developing the Center's Nuestro Texas campaign. Through this work, she helped to bring international attention to the lack of access to affordable reproductive health services for Latina immigrants in Texas' Rio Grande Valley. Prior to this, Karla was the Assistant Director of the Reproductive Rights Initiative at the New Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network, where she managed a national advocacy project aimed at ensuring the reproductive and sexual health rights of children, adolescents, and women in India.

Catalina Martinez Coral is a feminist from Cali, Columbia. She's currently the Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She is a member of the Causa Justa Movement and one of the plaintiffs in the historic ruling that partially decriminalized abortion in Columbia. She was one of the litigants in the Guzmán Albarracín v. Ecuador and Manuela v. El Salvador cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. She's also part of the They Are Girls Not Mothers Movement, and was one of the litigants who presented the cases of that campaign before the UN Human Rights Committee. She previously worked at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as a human rights specialist.

Karla, Catalina, thank you for joining me today.

Karla Torres:

Thank you so much, Maggie, for having us. We're big fans.

Catalina Martinez Coral:

Thank you, Maggie, for having us.

Maggie Gates:

Thank you. Thank you both. Okay. So I want to start by just establishing outright that reproductive healthcare, including abortion, is an essential human right. I feel it's important to set that out because we are in the United States, it's becoming less and less obvious that people take this for granted. So I just want to say our positioning here today is that it is an essential human right. Can you both tell us a bit about the human rights perspective on abortion and reproductive health, generally?

Karla Torres:

Sure. Absolutely. Thank you, Maggie. Thanks for this question, and thanks for grounding us at the outset and making this clear. So, to be clear, abortion is a fundamental right. A person's right to the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive healthcare, including abortion, is rooted in international human rights standards. And it is integral to a person's ability to realize their human rights, including their rights to health, life, equality, privacy, non-discrimination, and the freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Under international human rights standards, countries have an obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill our rights to sexual and reproductive health, including our right to abortion. In fact, human rights bodies have made clear that a person's right to health, for example, includes their sexual and reproductive health, and that their right to life requires countries to provide safe, legal, and effective access to abortion, as well as to remove existing barriers that prevent pregnant people from accessing abortion, including, for example, laws that criminalize it. And these international human rights standards are aligned with the World Health Organization, the WHO, which in 2022, issued updated guidelines, drawing on the latest evidence and data on the clinical service delivery, legal, and human rights aspects of abortion care. And that's the Abortion Care Guideline of 2022. In their updated guideline, the WHO makes several policy and law recommendations, including the complete decriminalization of abortion, and urges countries to ensure that abortion is accessible upon request. So doing away with grounds framing that we have seen in countries. So what we're seeing in the US today—the Supreme Court dismantling nearly 50 years of US precedent protecting the right to abortion, and then states across the country banning abortion at any point in time—undermines the US human rights obligations under these international human rights standards. And it's important to underscore here that these bans that we're seeing across the US disproportionately impact communities that already experience multiple and overlapping forms of discrimination, including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, people with disabilities, people living in rural areas, and young people as well.

Maggie Gates:

The Center called for the IACHR hearing on the human rights violations caused by abortion bans, post-ops. Karla, can you talk about the process of requesting the hearing and why you sought the hearing at the IACHR specifically for this issue?

Karla Torres:

Yes, of course. So you're right. The Center and partners requested a hearing, a thematic hearing with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to highlight how the Dobbs ruling and the abortion bans that we're seeing in the US have led to human rights violations across the country. And our decision was motivated mainly by two considerations. The first is the Inter-American Commission is a critical regional human rights body that considers human rights situations across the hemisphere, and it had not hosted a hearing on abortion in the US since the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs ruling. So the hearing would be an opportunity to elevate the situation with the Commission and highlight for the commissioners the many harmful effects that we're witnessing. The second consideration was that the hearing would follow closely behind the UN Human Rights Committee's Review of the US under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which occurred in October of 2022. And for that review, the Center, alongside its partners, worked to really inform the Committee on abortion access and maternal health in a post-ops era. In fact, only a week before the hearing at the Inter-American Commission, the Human Rights Committee issued its recommendations to the US and, in those recommendations, it recognized the human right to abortion and urged the US to take all necessary measures to ensure access to abortion, including by removing access barriers and repealing laws that criminalized it. So our engagement with the Inter-American Commission would build on advocacy that we'd recently done with the Human Rights Committee and the recommendations that were issued by the Human Rights Committee to the US in terms of process to present as full a picture of the harms that the Dobbs decision and the ensuing wave of abortion bans have caused and continue to cause. Every day the Center collaborated with 13 partner organizations working across movements. So, organizations working in reproductive health rights and justice, working in disability rights, and working in human rights more broadly. And these organizations included Amnesty International, the Abortion Care Network, SisterSong, women of color, Reproductive Justice Collective, and Pregnancy Justice. And our goals for the request, and as well as for the hearing, were threefold. One, we wanted to elevate this issue before the Commission as a human rights situation. We wanted to illustrate how the Supreme Court's ruling and the bans that followed were causing human rights violations and harming individuals, their communities, and healthcare providers. And then we wanted to call on the Commission to hold the US accountable to its human rights obligations, which the Commission is empowered to do. At the hearing, the commissioners heard from one of the Center's plaintiffs in our Texas exceptions case, who shared her experience of being denied abortion care after her water broke early.

They also heard from the director of an independent abortion clinic about how her clinic in West Virginia had to abruptly stop providing abortion care after the state enacted a total ban on abortion following the Dobbs ruling. And they heard from a leader in the reproductive justice movement about how the bans had been especially harmful to communities who have been historically pushed to the margins. And I've just got to say that after months of hard work with our partners, external and internal, we worked really closely with our partners on the L[atin] A[merica and the] C[aribbean] team of which Cata[lina] is a member. It was incredibly powerful to have all of our collective work culminate in this historic hearing. The testimony that we presented was exceptionally compelling, and it really illustrated the harms that these abortion bans are causing people every day. And we heard from the commissioners, both during the hearing and afterwards, how grateful they were to hear from people directly impacted and how much they recognize the strength that some of our partners really had to show in order to share their experience with the commissioners and obviously with the public.

Maggie Gates:

That's incredible. Just when you said West Virginia, my entire family extended family is from West Virginia. Both my parents were born and raised in West Virginia. And it's real, you know. There's real, real impact of these laws and decisions across the country for sure.

Karla Torres:

Absolutely.

Maggie Gates:

When the Dobbs decision that removed the constitutional right to abortion was passed in 2022, the United States became one of only four nations in the world, including El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Poland that have reversed abortion protections that existed on the books. Can you talk about the impact of this decision within the US but also internationally? What's the international perception of the US now?

Catalina Martinez Coral:

Yes, of course, Maggie. I will start with the international perspective and also how this can impact internationally. What is happening now around abortion matters. I'll say that of course. And certainly the regression we are experiencing in the United States is alarming for the global landscape of rights, even in terms of narrative. We know how the opposition will use these to really position a narrative on regression. But at the same time, I think that what this has indicated to the world and is indicating to the Global South is that we cannot simply take for granted the rights that we have gained, that we need to continue fighting for those rights, that we need to put together defense strategies so that we can continue keeping our rights. But at the same time, I wanted to say that the progress made in the Global South are very important to know what is happening in the Global South, what is happening in Latin America or in Argentina, Mexico, in Colombia, we are having these huge on reproductive rights and in specifically, and I think that what we need also to position as a global narrative is that even if the US had this decision with this retrogression, there are so many other countries that are going forward, like the majority of countries in the world going forward with abortion, abortion matters, abortion rights. I think that Latin America is a very important example of that. I think that what is happening in the US is not going to have an impact in Latin America and in the Global South. I think that is the case in Latin America for two reasons. The first one is that in Latin America, we have a strong constitutional history in our constitutions that are modern constitutions. Across the region, we have incorporated international law as part of our constitution. What this means is that the decisions that are taken by the Human Rights Committee at the UN level, or the decisions that are being made by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the treaties that are part of this international law community are part of the majority of the constitutions that we have in Latin America, which means that all the recognitions that these bodies have made around abortion are binding for us. You can see that, for example, in the recent decisions that the constitutional courts made in Columbia around abortion, or the decision that the Supreme Court in Mexico made also to abortion, where you can see how they are incorporating international and regional decisions to be able to advance the legal framework in Latin America in these countries. That is the first reason why I think that right now we have a very strong protection that cannot be removed easily. Because if you remove that protection, you'll face international responsibility. And second reason why I think that also it is going to be difficult to have a retrogression in the region is around how the feminist movement in Latin America has been working a lot on the social decriminalization of abortion. Now we have understood that of course the legal change is important, but how you make sure that legal change is implemented and is defended in the practice and how you do that well by doing a cultural change in the conversation, getting to people's hearts and minds, like letting them know why this is a matter of rights, why this is a matter of dignity. And I think that the green wave in Latin America is a huge example of that now, how women are doing communications campaigns, are doing pedagogic visits across the countries, are talking about these in several media outlets, are talking with politicians, are getting to the TV shows that are more recognized in the country. So how we can put this as a matter of this needs to be part of the more, most essential agenda of a. And I think a huge example of that is the green wave, and there are a lot of lessons to learn from that work.

Maggie Gates:

Yeah. The green wave is so inspiring, especially from the US perspective where we're just watching our reproductive rights across the country, just get chipped away, chipped away, chopped back to pieces, you know, really just sort of removed. As you're talking Catalina about the green wave and the really successful multi-pronged strategy that these grassroots organizations and groups have taken to make headway in their countries, it's first making me think about the very successful media campaign that anti-abortion activists and politicians in the United States have taken for 40 years, 50 years to get us to where we are now. But then it's also making me wonder if, do you think that the US is going to be able to follow suit in the way, sort of take the example from Latin America, from the green wave and also take the momentum from this recent hearing to make headway in this huge uphill battle that we have here?

Catalina Martinez Coral:

I'm sorry about that. I think that first there is a huge movement also in the United States. And even if you see the polls, the results of the polls at the state level and also at the federal level, you can see how you have a majority of approval for abortion matters, which is very important because that shows you that you have a society that understands why this is a matter of rights and a health issue as well. So that is one thing that I think that we need to be very aware of, and women in the States need to take all the courage and the support of the world and Latin America to take the streets and continue fighting for the rights that we own. Because this is not something that someone can decide one day that you don't have a right that you have had during 50 years. No, this is something that we're not going to tolerate. And the United States is not alone on this. The world is with you, the feminist movement in Latin America is with our sisters in the US in this fight. So that is the first thing that I wanted to say. And the second thing that I wanted to say is that it's a moment also for the United States to go and look to what is happening in international and regional bodies. I think that because you had this super strong Supreme Court for many years that was advancing your rights for many years in the country, you didn't have the need to look to what was happening outside. What was happening in the United Nations? What was happening in the Inter-American system. And I think that today there is a huge opportunity for the United States to communicate with these bodies because, at the end, these bodies are the ones that have been advancing human rights across the world in many areas, including reproductive rights. So I think that the possibility that we had, and Karla can tell us more about this, but the opportunity that we had to have this hearing before the commissioners hearing what is happening in the US and giving recommendations from a human rights perspective to a government that was there sitting in the hearing in front of us. I think that is a huge opportunity that we cannot miss, and we really need to build on what that hearing meant, not only because of the hearing itself, but also for what it means for the US to start this conversation with human rights bodies that are so needed. And I am very happy about that. I think that there is a world of opportunities for the US today to communicate with these bodies and to continue to advance in our rights at the domestic level.

Karla Torres:

Maggie, if I may, I want to respond to two points. So the first is around the US sort of taking lessons or being sort of galvanized by what we're seeing in Latin America and the green wave. I think that is absolutely true. Lawmakers are enacting these bans across the country, despite the fact that nearly two thirds of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. They're not representing people and what they actually want to see in their laws and policies. To protect the right to abortion, voters across the US are stepping up in really historic and important ways. Within six months, for example, of the Supreme Court's ruling in Dobbs, voters affirmed abortion rights in all six states where abortion was on the ballot. And most recently in Ohio, voters enshrined rights in their state constitution guaranteeing the right to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions. So it wasn't just around abortion, it was around fertility treatment, contraception, maternal healthcare. The reproductive autonomy framing is exceptionally powerful and is really being incorporated into this state constitutional amendment effort across the country. So, the voter efforts make clear what all of us know, which is adopted decision is wrong and wholly out of step with the majority of what Americans want, and it is causing profound harm to individuals and communities. Moreover, it really weakens the power of US law to uphold the nation's international, regional, and domestic human rights obligations. And here is the second thing that I wanted to add, which is at the Center for Reproductive Rights and with partners, we have been engaging with international human rights bodies to draw attention to how the US is failing its human rights obligations with regards to sexual and reproductive health. Since, actually, even before Dobbs, we presented and did advocacy before the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on how the Dobbs decision, which we were then expecting to come out. But the leaked decision had already been leaked how it was disproportionately harming marginalized communities in the US and how a decision in Dobbs that mirrored the leaked decision would exacerbate existing health inequities in the country and, in particular, sexual and reproductive health inequities. And we've continued, as I mentioned earlier, to do this with the Human Rights Committee. We will do this again every opportunity that we have to hold the US accountable with international as well as regional human rights bodies. We will continue to do that because, as Cata[lina] says, what is happening outside of the US influences the way that we get to frame and really advocate for reproductive health and rights in the US. The US is not just an exporter of some of the “anti” things that we see in this country. It also needs to be an importer of the human rights standards that are being developed and refined and expanded by other countries and by advocates in those other countries, and ultimately the international and regional human rights bodies. So to get this point, I think we have a lot to learn from the green wave and from other progressive movements around not just looking at the liberty right to abortion, but looking at the right to reproductive autonomy, and to life, and to a life with dignity. And to do that in the US in a way that we haven't done in the past. Maggie Gates: Yeah. Thank you both for those incredible points, and especially the point about human rights. It can be a little jarring sometimes for Americans to think about domestic human rights because we're Americans and arrogant and hubristic, and we're used to historically thinking about human rights in other places. So that's one reason that I find the UN, the High Commission on Human rights, the IACHR to be so powerful because they are powerful international human rights bodies that can turn the spotlight onto the United States. And when they do so, Americans are often like, “oh my God, I've taken for granted that all of this is happening,” or “I haven't been paying attention,” and it can be extremely powerful. I remember when the UN, during the protests in Missouri, issued a statement telling people of African descent not to travel to the United States because it was too dangerous. And the reaction to that was, “oh my God, how could they possibly say that?” I was like, “well, we're watching news footage of these like crazy protests and police violence constantly. Of course they're going to say something like that.” So thank you for this amazing work. Is there real hope of international human rights bodies like the IACHR to push the US to reinstate abortion rights? Karla Torres: I think absolutely there is hope. Esta shared the impact of the work that we do with international and regional human rights bodies is generally seen over a very long term. It's incremental. Creating international human rights standards that have an impact on legal frameworks and public policies is difficult work that requires persistence, but it ultimately contributes to progress. Progress that we're seeing in Latin America and in other parts of the world around abortion. Specifically the US may be an outlier today—I think it is one of four countries that have moved away from progressive abortion legal reform—but it hopefully will not be an outlier in five or 10 years. And there are also lessons to be learned from the green wave of, as we've been discussing, the ways in which the progress we're seeing in Latin America has really shaped a law to recognize abortion as a fundamental human right, and to help ensure that people can meaningfully exercise their reproductive autonomy. So yes, absolutely there is hope. Catalina Martinez Coral: I truly agree with Karla that there is hope, and I'll say that an example of why I think this is the fact that the government showed up at the hearing. During the Trump administration, when we had hearings on the US before the Inter-American Commission, the state officials didn't show up at that moment. It was like the way from the government to say, “we don't agree with this body and we are not showing up.” But in this case, they showed up, and I think that that is a demonstration and a willing[ness] to really collaborate with the system and with this language of human rights, and I'll give some examples on how this can impact if there is a real willing[ness] from a government to collaborate and have a dialogue with the Inter-American system. At one moment, 2017, the Congress in Chile was discussing the bill on abortion to utilize abortion in the country under three exceptions. And one of the many, many, many things that, with Chilean activists and many organizations, we did to influence that decision was that we prepared the hearing before the [Inter-]American Commission on Human Rights. We prepared this hearing. I remember that even Isa, who is a super well-known writer in Latin America, she was part of our hearing and she intervened before the Commission with us. And we talked why this was so important for the Congress to make this a step forward to utilize abortion in the country. And one of the answers from the government officials that were there in the hearing at that moment—the president of Chile was Michelle Bachelet, who was of course the one behind the bills that was presented before the Congress—they said “this is a priority. We are going to take all the recommendations from the Commission. This is going to happen.” And this is one of the things that became very vital during the discussions in the country, and I am sure that this had an impact of what happened in the Congress at that moment. That is a very successful example, because we achieved the legalization in Chile, but also because we were facing a government that was open for discussions and that was open to take these recommendations to Chile and to make the changes needed to protect human rights. So for me, it is very important to see state officials from the US. Their presence in this hearing, for me, is very important and willing that they really want to collaborate with the system.

Maggie Gates:

I hope you're right. Okay. Do you have any last points that you feel is especially important for our listeners to know about the future of reproductive rights in the United States before we go?

Karla Torres:

Yeah, just to say that the dismantling of Roe was devastating and continues to be devastating. And what we're seeing across the country is rightfully drawing condemnation from international human rights bodies, global leaders. It is also, I think, opening the eyes of a lot of people in terms of what does it mean when you remove the right of an individual to decide for themselves whether they want to end their pregnancy, whether it is right for their life, for their health, for their families and hand that over to states. I think that it has been really galvanizing for people and really connected for them the right to abortion to the right to bodily autonomy, to the right to live a life with dignity. I think all of those things are going to contribute to a growing movement to, as Catalina says, to claim our rights, to not think of them as something that is granted to us, but that it's something that is inalienable to us. The human rights framework is so important and compelling in this and in so many other situations. And I think what we're seeing in the US, the backsliding, the retrogression that we're seeing on abortion, and then all of the harms that are befalling people every day across the spectrum of reproductive healthcare, of access to reproductive healthcare services, and reproductive healthcare outcomes, is I think going to really be a motivating factor in people embracing their human rights and really claiming them in a way that we maybe haven't done before. And I'm hopeful that through individual collective action, advocacy, litigation, we can drive for policies [and] laws that reflect what we actually want, what the majority of Americans want to see, and whether that's at the state level or at the federal level, but to drive for real change that closes the gap between US law and international human rights standards and really repositions the US as a leader in reproductive healthcare access, and removes us from the very small minority of countries that have retrogressed on abortion and that we can then join our sisters and partners in Latin America and in other countries in really calling for the decriminalization and the liberalization of abortion access, but also more broadly around reproductive autonomy and reproductive freedom.

Catalina Martinez Coral:

Yes. And I will only add that we know that to be able to create a change and to be able to overcome this regression in the US this will need a lot of strategies. Know this is something that you're not going to achieve doing one thing. But this is the fight of many strategies together. Like the hearing before the Commission, of course, was one of those strategies. But we also are litigating cases state by state to be able to overcome restrictions. We are organizing strikes with federal women across the region. We are working with communications, we are working with advocacy. We are sitting down with government officials. And when I talk about “we,” I'm not talking only about the Center; I'm talking about the movement as whole. I think that that is a very important message to give. Like, this is something that we can only achieve if we work together as a collective using several strategies. This is a fight that we're giving and that is the way we need to give these fights. And I think that if there is something that the States also can learn from what is happening outside, what is happening in the south, for example, in Latin America, is how we can organize ourselves to give these fights for our rights. Sometimes to be able to look outside is important. Like these are the fights that we have been getting for many years in Latin America and we're achieving these today because we understood that there were things that we needed to learn also from our sisters across the region, ourselves as this green wave, this Maria . And I think that is also important, to see the lessons learned that the world has given to the US to be able to see that and to be able to embrace whatever is useful for the context in the US.

Maggie Gates:

Beautiful. Thank you both. This has been such a great glimpse into the incredible work that you're both doing, that you're all doing, especially with the organizations that participated in the hearing. I just wanna say thank you and it's been such a pleasure talking to you both today.

Karla Torres:

Thank you so much, Maggie, for having us and also for your commitment to human rights issues at home and abroad. We really appreciate it.

Maggie Gates:

Thank you.